the best songs ever: the lost years

[Eric the Green]

I certainly have been moved by music all my life, as mikebert observed. I am sure the music that made teenagers feel good (allegedly; it seems like it was expressing rage or boredom more often) in these "lost years," would not have made me feel good when I was any younger. But teenagers are more likely to be attached to the music geared to them as teenagers. The need to be cool and be up on what's happenin' certainly is there, and that's part of why I tuned in in 1964. Today's teenagers are more likely to listen to musicians their own age or slightly older, and that has been true before too. It's more expected of teens to groove to music; older people are too often forced to spend all their time working. Myself, I could never be convinced that the American and British pop music of the 1960s was not much better than the American pop music of the 1990s. I maintain there is an objective element to it, and that my opinion is not caused by my age. And I always suspect biological explanations of anything; the differences between ages are also strongly sociological, and also inherent in the music.

The Beach Boys asked "will I still dig the same things that turned me on as a kid" in 1964, and they started their age count at the age I was when I bought the record. Now, I answer that question, yes!

Myself, in the 3T era I was just as keyed in to music as I was in the 2T era; perhaps a bit more. Music has been a big part of my life at all ages. In the 1980s I was moved enough to become more of a musician than I had been, and I started practicing and playing again and hosting a radio show. But it was classical organ music, and the contemporary new age ambient and electronic music, that moved me. I tuned out the commercial and "alternative" pop stuff to a great extent, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. No doubt I missed some pretty good music, but most of the time, what I hear now of it does not make me wish I had tuned into it. My only regret is that I can't do better on recent pop culture questions on Jeopardy. I do like to know what's going on at all times. It's just that a lot of certain genres are not listenable, so that makes it harder. And as I have pointed out, I was just as critical of some of the pop music in the 2T as I was of later stuff. Bad stuff (or at least mediocre stuff) abounds abundantly in pop; that's just the nature of the beast. Vox populi is not equivalent to good taste.

I am glad that I like some of the 4T pop music, and I doubt I would have been moved any more by Justin Bieber's "Pray" had I heard it in 1966, than having heard it in 2012. But, in 1972 I was fortunate enough to hear and buy Meher Baba's universal prayer as produced by Pete Townshend. The music, in short, is the music.